Mentorship

Marcus Bosenberg MD, PhD, is a physician scientist who directs a leading melanoma research laboratory, is Co-Leader of the Cancer Immunology Program of Yale Cancer Center, Director of the Yale Center for Immuno-Oncology, Contact PI of the Yale SPORE in Skin Cancer,  Director of the Center for Precision Cancer Modeling, and is a practicing dermatopathologist at Yale Dermatopathology through Yale Medicine.In his research, Dr. Bosenberg studies factors that regulate anti-cancer immune responses. His laboratory has developed several widely utilized mouse models in order to study how melanoma forms and progresses, to test new cancer therapies, and how the immune system can be stimulated to fight cancer. He works to translate basic scientific findings into improvements in cancer diagnosis and therapy. He has published over 200 peer-reviewed articles and is a member of the Yale Cancer Center Executive Committee.Dr. Bosenberg mentors undergraduate, graduate, medical, and MD-PhD students in his laboratory, teaches at Yale School of Medicine, and trains resident physicians, fellows, and postdoctoral fellows.

Barbara Burtness, MD is Professor of Medicine (Medical Oncology) at the Yale School of Medicine, Chief Translational Research Officer, and Associate Cancer Center Director for Translational Research at the Yale Cancer Center. She serves as Co-Leader of the Developmental Therapeutics Program, Division Chief for Head and Neck/Sarcoma Oncology, and Director of the Yale Head and Neck Specialized Program of Research Excellence. Dr. Burtness is internationally recognized for her research in head and neck cancer. She chairs the ECOG-ACRIN Cooperative Group Head and Neck Cancer Therapeutics Committee and the ECOG-ACRIN Task Force for the Advancement of Women, and leads national and international trials of targeted therapy in head and neck cancer. Her laboratory studies synthetic lethal therapeutic strategies in head and neck cancer and the targeting of aurora kinase A to overcome adaptive resistance to EGFR inhibition and - in lung cancer- to direct KRAS inhibition.

Dr. Lieping Chen is an immunologist interested in basic T cell biology, cancer immunology, and translational research to develop new treatments for human diseases including cancer. Prior to joining Yale, he was a faculty member at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Mayo Clinic, and a scientist in Bristol-Myers Squibb Pharmaceutical Research Institute. Dr. Chen has published over 400 peer-reviewed research articles. His work in the discovery of the PD-1/PD-L1 pathway for cancer immunotherapy was cited as the #1 breakthrough of the year by Science magazine in 2013. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Association for Cancer Research.

The DiMaio laboratory is studying the molecular mechanisms of how human papillomaviruses enter cells, with a particular focus on identifying the cellular proteins that mediate virus entry and intracellular trafficking and determining their molecular mechanisms of action. In addition, it is using viral transmembrane proteins as a basis to develop a class of artificial small transmembrane proteins with a variety of biological activities, including the ability to form tumors and confer resistance to virus infection. Some of these proteins are the simplest proteins ever described and their study will reveal new features of protein action and the basis for specificity in protein-protein interactions.

Dr. Flavell is Sterling Professor of Immunobiology at Yale University School of Medicine, and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He received his B.Sc. (Honors) in 1967 and Ph.D. in 1970 in biochemistry from the University of Hull, England, and performed postdoctoral work in Amsterdam (1970-72) with Piet Borst and in Zurich (1972-73) with Charles Weissmann. Before accepting his current position in 1988, Dr. Flavell was first Assistant Professor (equivalent) at the University of Amsterdam (1974-79); then Head of the Laboratory of Gene Structure and Expression at the National Institute for Medical Research, Mill Hill, London (1979-82); and subsequently President and Chief Scientific Officer of Biogen Research Corporation, Cambridge, Massachusetts (1982-88). Dr. Flavell is a fellow of the Royal Society, a member of the National Academy of Sciences as well as the National Academy of Medicine. Richard Flavell uses transgenic and gene-targeted mice to study Innate and Adaptive immunity, T cell tolerance and activation in immunity and autoimmunity,apoptosis, and regulation of T cell differentiation.

Radiation oncologist Peter M. Glazer, MD, PhD, is the chair of the Department of Therapeutic Radiology. He has dedicated his career to helping cancer patients receive the highest quality of care available in a supportive environment.“When patients are undergoing radiotherapy for cancer, it can be a sensitive and challenging time for them and their families,” he says. “Our team does everything possible to keep our patients safe and comfortable throughout treatment.” Dr. Glazer makes it his priority to provide patients seeking care at Smilow Cancer Hospital and its Care Centers with the most advanced technologies and evidence-based treatments. “We take great pride in giving our physicians the best tools to treat cancer,” he says.As a professor of both therapeutic radiology and genetics at Yale School of Medicine, Dr. Glazer researches new therapeutic strategies for treating cancer and the role of altered DNA repair in tumor progression. His research was recently recognized by the National Cancer Institute of the NIH with a prestigious Outstanding Investigator Award of $7 million that will support his efforts to develop novel DNA repair inhibitors for cancer therapy.

Dr. Hafler is the William S. and Lois Stiles Edgerly Professor and Chairman Department of Neurology, Yale School of Medicine and is the Neurologist-in-Chief of the Yale-New Haven Hospital. He graduated magna cum laude in 1974 from Emory University with combined B.S. and M.Sc. degrees in biochemistry, and the University of Miami School of Medicine in 1978. He then completed his internship in internal medicine at Johns Hopkins followed by a neurology residency at Cornell Medical Center-New York Hospital in New York. Dr. Hafler received training in immunology at the Rockefeller University then at Harvard where he joined the faculty in 1984. He was one of the Executive Directors of the Program in Immunology at Harvard Medical School and was on the faculty of the Harvard-MIT Health Science and Technology program where he was actively involved in the training of graduate students and post-doctoral fellows. Hafler, in many respects, is credited with identifying the central mechanisms underlying the likely cause of MS. His early seminal work demonstrated that the disease began in the blood, not the brain, which eventually led to the development of Tysabri to treat the disease by blocking the movement of immune cells from the blood to the brain. He was the first to identify myelin-reactive T cells in the disease, published in Nature, showing that indeed, MS was an autoimmune disorder. He then went on to show why autoreactive T cells were dysregulated by the first identification of regulatory T cells in humans followed by demonstration of their dysfunctional state in MS. As a founding, Broad Institute associate member, Hafler identified the genes that cause MS, published in the New England Journal of Medicine and Nature. More recently, he identified the key transcription factors and signaling pathways associated with MS genes as potential treatment targets. Finally, he recently discovered that salt drives induction of these pathogenic myelin reactive T cells, both works published in Nature. Hafler was the Breakstone Professor of Neuroscience at Harvard, and became Chairman of Neurology at Yale in 2009, where he has built an outstanding clinical and research program that strongly integrates medical sciences. Hafler is among the most highly cited living neurologists and has received numerous honors including the Dystel Prize from the AAN for his MS research, the Raymond Adams Award from the ANA, and was the recipient of the NIH Javits Investigator Award, and The Dale McFarlin Prize by the International Society of Neuroimmunology. He is a member of AOA, the American Society of Clinical Investigation, and was elected into the National Academy of Medicine.

Dr. Halene is a physician-scientist who received her MD degree at Eberhardt-Karls-University in Tübingen, Germany. She subsequently completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Donald B. Kohn at CHLA in Los Angeles and her residency in internal medicine in the traditional program at Yale New Haven Hospital. She completed her fellowship in hematology/oncology at Yale and joined the ladder faculty at YSM as an assistant professor in 2010. At that time she was also named director of the Hematology Tissue Bank for Yale Cancer Center. She was promoted to associate professor in 2016 and subsequently served as interim chief of the Section of Hematology prior to her appointment as chief of that section in 2020. Her laboratory studies hematopoiesis and myelopoiesis and in particular how mutations in splicing factors and perturbations in RNA modifications contribute to hematologic malignancies such as myelodysplasia and leukemia. Dr. Halene, in collaboration with the Flavell laboratory in the YSM Department of Immunobiology, has developed the first efficient xenotransplantation model in humanized mice to study myelodysplasia and enable testing of novel drug treatments. Dr. Halene’s research has garnered significant attention from the international community, as evidenced by numerous invited speaking engagements, an invitation to serve as a section editor on myeloid malignancies for a major journal, and publications in top tier journals in her field. In 2015 she was presented with the Sir William Osler Young Investigator Award and in 2019 was elected a member of the Interurban Clinical Club. Dr. Halene is director of the DeLuca Center for Innovation in Hematology Research. Through generous funding from The Frederick A. DeLuca Foundation, the center has established a comprehensive biospecimen bank, awarded pilot and career development grant funding to advance cutting-edge discoveries in hematologic malignancies and classical hematologic disorders. Meet Dr. Stephanie Halene>>

Dr. Herbst is nationally recognized for his leadership and expertise in lung cancer treatment and research. He is best known for his work in developmental therapeutics and the personalized therapy of non-small cell lung cancer, in particular the process of linking genetic abnormalities of cancer cells to novel therapies. Learn more about Dr. Herbst >> Dr. Herbst’s primary mission is the enhanced integration of clinical, laboratory, and research programs. He has worked over several decades as a pioneer of personalized medicine and immunotherapy to identify biomarkers and bring novel targeted treatments and immunotherapies to patients, serving as principal investigator for numerous clinical trials testing these agents in advanced stage lung cancers. This work led to the approval of several therapies (such as gefitinib, cetuximab, bevacizumab, axitinib), which have revolutionized the field and greatly enhanced patient survival. He and his Yale colleagues were among the first to describe the PD-1/PD-L1 adaptive immune response in early phase trials and to offer trials of PD-L1 inhibitors atezolizumab and pembrolizumab to lung cancer patients. His leadership in targeted therapeutics resulted in being selected for ASCO’s plenary presentation in 2020 and 2023 and publication of results of the third-generation EGFR-inhibitor osimertinib for the treatment of resected EGFR-mutant NSCLC in the New England Journal of Medicine. In 2015 and again in 2020, his team at Yale was awarded a Lung Cancer SPORE (P50 grant) by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), which has identified new immunotherapies and mechanisms of sensitivity and resistance to EGFR targeted therapies. His work has also been funded by ASCO, AACR, the United States Department of Defense, and by an AACR/ Stand Up to Cancer Dream Team grant. His work on "umbrella” trials has galvanized the field of targeted therapy and cancer drug approvals at the FDA. Nationally, he works closely with public-private partnerships to develop large master protocol clinical studies. He was co-leader for the BATTLE-1 clinical trial program, co-leads the subsequent BATTLE-2 clinical trial program, and was the founding principal investigator (PI) of the Lung Master Protocol (Lung-MAP), a position he held for ten years. He testified on this before the House of Representatives 21st Century Cures committee and serves as a prominent figure in this area. He has served over ten years as a member of the National Academy of Medicine’s Cancer Policy Forum, for which he organized several meetings focused on policy issues in personalized medicine and tobacco control. He is now serving his second term on the National Academy of Medicine’s Cancer Policy Forum. He is currently the Vice Chair for the Southwestern Oncology Group (SWOG) Lung Committee and chair emeritus and special advisor for the Lung-MAP trial. After earning a B.S. and M.S. degree from Yale University, Dr. Herbst earned his M.D. at Cornell University Medical College and his Ph.D. in molecular cell biology at The Rockefeller University in New York City, New York. His postgraduate training included an internship and residency in medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. His clinical fellowships in medicine and hematology were completed at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, respectively. Subsequently, Dr. Herbst completed a M.S. degree in clinical translational research at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Prior to his appointment at Yale, Dr. Herbst was the Barnhart Distinguished Professor and Chief of the Section of Thoracic Medical Oncology in the Department of Thoracic/Head and Neck Medical Oncology, at The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center (UT-MDACC) in Houston, Texas. He also served as Professor in the Department of Cancer Biology and Co-Director of the Phase I Clinical Trials Program. Dr. Herbst is a highly respected clinician­ scientist who has been a champion of translational medicine for decades, recently authoring a high-profile review of the 20-year progress in lung cancer. He has authored or co-authored more than 450 publications, including peer-reviewed journal articles, abstracts, and book chapters. His work has appeared in many prominent journals, such as the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Clinical Cancer Research, Lancet, and the New England Journal of Medicine. Work published in Nature was awarded the 2015 Herbert Pardes Clinical Research Excellence Award by the Clinical Research Forum. His abstracts have been presented at the annual meetings of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), the World Conference on Lung Cancer, the Society of Nuclear Medicine Conference, and the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Clinical Oncology and a member of the American Association of Cancer Research (AACR), where serves as Chair of the AACR Scientific Policy and Government Affairs Committee. He has been a major proponent of efforts to promote tobacco control and regulation (including e-cigarettes), authoring multiple policy statements and leading frequent Capitol Hill briefings. In 2019, he was elected to the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) board of directors and the board of directors of the American Association of Cancer Research(AACR). He is a fellow of the American College of Physicians and an elected member of the Association of American Physicians. For his lifetime achievement in scientific contributions to thoracic cancer research, Dr. Herbst was awarded the 2016 Paul A. Bunn, Jr. Scientific Award by the IASLC at their 17th World Conference on Lung Cancer in Vienna, Austria. A team of Yale Cancer Center investigators led by Roy S. Herbst, MD, PhD, was awarded the 2018 Team Science Award from the Association for Clinical and Translational Science (ACTS) for its pioneering work in advancing our understanding of Immunotherapy. In 2020, Dr. Herbst was awarded the AACR Distinguished Public Service Award for Exceptional Leadership in Cancer Science Policy. Dr. Herbst is the recipient of the 2022 Giants of Cancer Care® award for Lung Cancer and was honored by Friends of Cancer Research in 2022 as one of their 25 scientific and advocacy leaders who, through their work and partnership, have been instrumental over the course of the last 25 years in making significant advancements for patients. Over the course of his career, Dr. Herbst has worked to bring novel therapies to the treatment of non-small cell lung cancer, bringing us closer to curing this disease.

Akiko Iwasaki, Ph.D., is a Sterling Professor of Immunobiology and Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at Yale University, and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in Canada and her postdoctoral training from the National Institutes of Health. Her research focuses on the mechanisms of immune defense against viruses at the mucosal surfaces, and the development of mucosal vaccine strategies. She is the co-Lead Investigator of the Yale COVID-19 Recovery Study, which aims to determine the changes in the immune response of people with long COVID after vaccination. Dr. Iwasaki also leads multiple other studies to interrogate the pathobiology of long COVID, both in patients, and through developing animal models of long COVID. Dr. Iwasaki was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2018, to the National Academy of Medicine in 2019, to the European Molecular Biology Organization in 2021, and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021.

Dr. Kluger is a medical oncologist who sees patients with melanoma and renal cell carcinoma. Her research interests focus on developing new drug regimens and biomarkers predictive of response to therapies in melanoma and renal cell carcinoma. She participates in a number of clinical trials studying new agents for the treatment of these diseases, both targeting the immune system and the cancer cell. She runs an active research laboratory that studies tumor and immune cells from patients treated with novel therapies to determine mechanisms of resistance to therapy and mediators of toxicity from immune checkpoint inhibitors. The laboratory also conducts pre-clinical studies to improve treatment regimens for patients with melanoma, renal cell carcinoma or brain metastasis. Please visit the lab website at: https://sites.google.com/yale.... Learn more about Dr. Kluger>>

I have been working in the broad fields of bioinformatics, machine learning, applied mathematics and dynamics of quantum fields.  My current research interests relate to development of spectral methods and unsupervised & supervised deep learning approaches for analyzing high dimensional genomics, transcriptomics, epigenomics and proteomics data from various modalities.  I apply these methods in the context of cancer, immunobiology,  brain and phylogeny studies with the aim of revealing cell specific regulatory networks and characterizing biomarkers.

Diane Krause MD, PhD is Professor of Laboratory Medicine, Pathology and Cell Biology at Yale University; Associate Director of the Yale Stem Cell Center; and Director of the Clinical Cell Processing Laboratory. She received an Sc.B. degree in Biology from Brown University, and an MD and PhD degree from the University of Pennsylvania. After completing a residency in Clinical Pathology at the University of Pennsylvania, she performed post-doctoral studies at Johns Hopkins University. She runs a well-funded research laboratory focused on leukemogenesis, hematopoietic stem and progenitor cell fate specification clinical cell therapy and pluripotent stem cell differentiation down the parathyroid lineage. Watch a video with Dr. Diane Krause >>

Pat LoRusso brings more than 25 years of expertise in medical oncology, drug development, and early phase clinical trials. Prior to her Yale appointment, she served in numerous leadership roles at Wayne State University’s Barbara Karmanos Cancer Institute, most recently as director of the Phase I Clinical Trials Program and of the Eisenberg Center for Experimental Therapeutics.

Dr. Ma is Professor of Epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, and Co-Leader of the Cancer Prevention and Control Research Program at the Yale Comprehensive Cancer Center, Yale School of Medicine. She studies the etiology and health outcomes of different types of cancer, with a focus on pediatric cancer and malignancies of the hematopoietic system (e.g., leukemia, lymphoma, myelodysplastic syndromes, and myeloproliferative neoplasms). Her research has addressed the impact of immunological factors, chemical exposures, and genetic characteristics on the risk of cancer. In addition, she has assessed the patterns of care and cost implications of cancer screening and treatment in older adults.

Training Period: 1998-2003  Degree/Year: BS/MS-1995; PhD-2002; MD-2003  Source of Funding: MSTP Grant  1st Position: Resident, Therapeutic Radiology,Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, MA, research with J. Szostak.  Current Position: Asst Prof, Therapeutic Radiology, Yale U, New Haven, CT.

Katerina Politi studied Biology at the University of Pavia in Italy. She then moved to New York, where she obtained her PhD in Genetics and Development working with Argiris Efstratiadis at Columbia University. Following graduate school, she joined Harold Varmus's lab at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and began her work on the molecular basis of lung cancer. She continues this work at Yale as a Professor in the Department of Pathology and Yale Cancer Center.

David Rimm is the Anthony N. Brady Professor of Pathology in the Departments of Pathology and Medicine (Oncology) at the Yale University School of Medicine. He is the Director of Yale Pathology Tissue Services and the Lab for Quantitative Diagnostics in Anatomic Pathology. He completed an MD-PhD at Johns Hopkins University Medical School followed by a Pathology Residency at Yale and a Cytopathology Fellowship at the Medical College of Virginia. His research lab group focuses on quantitative pathology using the AQUA® technology invented in his lab, and other quantitative methods, with projects related to predicting response and resistance to both targeted and immune- therapy in cancer. His lab is involved in the use of new high-plex methods including digital spatial profiling (NanoString) for new biomarker discovery. He is also interested in translation of assays to the clinic and standardization of those assays for CLIA labs. The work is supported by grants from the NIH, BCRF, and sponsored research agreements from biopharma. He also serves on the CAP Immunohistochemistry committee and multiple scientific advisory boards for biotech and pharma. He is an author of over 500 peer-reviewed papers with an H-index of 120 and 8 patents.

Dr. Alessandro D. Santin, a native of Italy, graduated with honors from the University of Brescia, Italy and received his postgraduate training in Obstetrics & Gynecology at the same University. He served a fellowship in Gynecologic Oncology at the University of California, Irvine and an International Fellowship in the Division of Gynecologic Oncology at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Little Rock, Arkansas. In 2000 he became a Clinical Assistant Professor and in 2004 an Associate Professor with Tenure in the same Division. Watch a video with Dr. Alessandro Santin >> Dr. Santin joined the faculty in the Section of Gynecologic Oncology in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences at Yale as Professor as of July 2008. He was the recipient of the American Association young investigator award and the Italian Society of Gynecologic Oncologists award for translational science. Dr. Santin has more than 300 original research and peer-reviewed publications including multiple review articles and book chapters and he has written extensively on various topics, including cancer of the ovary, endometrium and cervix as well as on tumor immunology and immunotherapy. Dr. Santin's clinical interests include cancer of the ovary, uterus, vagina, cervix and vulva; intraperitoneal chemotherapy, tumor genetics, immunology and immunotherapy; tumor angiogenesis, radiation biology and experimental therapeutics in Gynecologic Oncology. His current research interests include immunotherapy for ovarian, cervical and endometrial carcinomas refractory to standard treatment modalities; development of therapeutic vaccines against Human Papillomavirus (HPV) infected genital tumors, and the use of monoclonal antibodies against chemotherapy resistant gynecologic malignancies. Dr. Santin is a member of the Society of Gynecologic Oncologists, the Gynecologic Oncology Group, The International Gynecologic Oncology Society, the American Medical Association, the American Society of Immunologists, the Italian Society of Gynecologic Oncologists, the American Association for Cancer Research and the American Society of Clinical Oncology.